¹ Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London, 2009), p. 425.

² Cited in Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy”, Boundary 2, 26:3 (1999), pp. 19–27, 21.

³ Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, in particular, contains important insights on political representation. See Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn (New York, 1978), pp. 594–617. On Marx’s ecological consciousness, see John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and Nature (New York, 2024); Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge, 2023).

⁴ Sheri Berman writes that “capitalism is both the reason for and the bane of the modern left”. See Sheri Berman, “Unheralded Battle: Capitalism, the Left, Social Democracy, and Democratic Socialism”, Dissent, Winter (2009). Available at: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/unheralded-battle-capitalism-the-left-social-democracy-and-democratic-socialism/; last accessed 8 September 2024.

⁵ Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Oakland, CA, 2023).

⁶ See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd edn (London, 2014). Laclau and Mouffe are among the “lucky few” contemporary authors Sand mentions by name. As far as social movements are concerned, Sand mentions mostly European ones, such as Podemos in Spain (pp. 238–239). Despite promising a “global” history of the Left, the author ignores a variety of progressive agrarian social movements. See the authors who aim at “reclaiming populism” from the Right, including Saturnino M. Borras Jr., “Agrarian Social Movements. The Absurdly Difficult but not Impossible Agenda of Defeating Right-Wing Populism and Exploring a Socialist Future”, Journal of Agrarian Change, 20:1 (2020), pp. 3–36.

⁷ Shlomo Sand, Twilight of History (London, 2017).

⁸ Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019), pp. 5–6.

⁹ See Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals (Cambridge, MA, 2013). In contrast to Sand, Rosanvallon acknowledges the broader import of “equality” well beyond the Left. Hence, his work can be used to both clarify and criticize Sand.

¹⁰ Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left”, in Carl Oglesby (ed), The New Left Reader (New York, 1969), pp. 144–158; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1976).

¹¹ Eric Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York, 2010).